Wireless charging to become integrated in devices thanks to Texas Instruments bqTESLA kit

Wireless charging isn’t exactly a new thing, but it also hasn’t taken off as much as we would have expected. You can waltz into any number of electronics retail stores and find that they are selling Powermat or some other variation on the inductive charging thing. The problem is that you have to buy a special adapter or case for every device you want to charge.

Texas Instruments is apparently trying to change that with the bqTESLA kit. This is the industry’s first Qi-certified wireless power development kit and it should be able to work with smartphones, digital cameras, and all sorts of other portable devices. Unlike Powermat, this solution is designed so that the receiver is already built into the target device.

No need for proprietary adapters for charging. By working with the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), the Qi certification on this TI development could work to promote standardization among wireless power systems. The charger takes electricity and converts it to a wireless signal. The receiver gets this wireless signal and converts it back to electricity.

The bqTESLA development kit is avaialble now from Texas Instruments, offering up to 5 watts of power at a time. TI says that you don’t need any additional software to make it work. If you’re feeling like MacGyver’ing together your own wireless solution, you can pick up one of these kits for a cool $500.